Image via SieteGang Yabbie/Instagram
Harley Geffner has acquired Yamashita’s gold (Waiting for Britney Spears by Jeff Weiss, out now and available here).
Stamped out of San Diego County, this has got to be one of the most fun posse cuts of the year. It’s also the first time I’ve heard another rap song flip E-40’s “Da Bumble,” which is a perfect rap beat (if you know of any others, please point me their way). They sped it up, added some keys, and went to town on it. The lexical iconography stands out, with S’s pronounced as a G’s, “pimp” pronounced as “yimp” and every “yop” having a different meaning. There’s even some Drakeoisms (of course) with an explicit shout out to Mr. Mosely. Some of it will likely be unintelligible to the untrained ear, but all of it sounds hard.
The rappers pass the baton with liquid timing, a few bars at a time, with each mini verse calling back to words or lines from previous rappers. One rapper’s 40 barks like a greyhound, the next rapper’s at the Greyhound transporting “30-some pounds.” Aside from the wordplay and linguistic glyphs, it’s just a fun song to move to. It starts with Yabbie leading the charge on that Milwaukee pointing dance, and evolves into something that’ll make you want to stomp your Hi Top 1s through the floor.
Rx Papi has done it again. Over another jazzy Alchemist beat, he stabs you right in the heart with a bleeding 4-minute plus confessional that combines some of his strongest rap and flow instincts, with his preternatural storytelling ability. This is S-Tier Papi, how he strings some of the craziest 3 bar anecdotes together, and winds them through these rhyme schemes and patterns that make no sense, yet somehow come together perfectly. He raps at one point: “I pull up in a ghost, blow smoke, and make a ghost of him / I’m sliding down the coast, with a ghost, dirty pole on me,” and the repetition just rolls through your mind like a marine layer fog overtaking a beach town. He makes it look so easy.
Honestly though, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that separates the best Papi tracks from the middling ones. They’re all incredibly poignant and he has a penchant for hearkening back to sociological stems of his lifestyle and behavior. It’s just one of those, when you hear it, you know it, type of deals. And this is it. Maybe it’s just that the writing, although thematically similar, is just 30% sharper on his best? Maybe it’s that the beautiful loopy Alc beat brought it out of him? The only way to do it justice is to let the writing speak for itself:
“I pop perks, my feelings hurt, that’s when I start to speak
My momma cryin’ cuz she don’t understand what’s wrong with me
But she can’t see the fact she lost her son all in the streets
I been in it since a baby, I been in it since a youngin
Had to go out, get my own food when I felt pain up in my stomach
I’m just keepin it 100, this a life I never wanted, but I never ran from it”
Before getting into the rap here, I need to know the story of why Baby Money has an Elton John Made In England t-shirt. Does he like Elton John’s music? Does he feel spiritually connected to mid-late stage Elton? Was he gifted the shirt and someone said “lowkey, Elton John is kind of hard, you should peep,” and he accepted it with one of those half-hearted inclinations that he was going to, but then never got around to it? Did he just see it on Grailed and think that white boy looks sick with the faded style of the t-shirt? Does he admire his notoriously off-the-dome style of writing?
Can we just dream for a second and picture Baby Money watching the music video for “Made In England” and yearning for an idyllic England, looking at the imagery flashing by and thinking what it would be like to grow up as a boy on the streets of Middlesex? There are a lot of possible scenarios here, and if anyone can connect me to Baby Money’s management, I would love to do the oral history of Baby Money’s acquisition of that t-shirt. Now, all I can picture is him putting people onto Elton John in a Homer Simpson-esque way where he drops rare, obscure knowledge mid-convo that everyone ignores.
Anyways, “Braggin Rights,” is a great song. It’s a Flint style beat, jump started with live wire, and each guy takes turns ripping their verses. YN Jay comes out, lean belly in tow, with an intro “Hold ooooooon,” that will take you right back to 2021. Rio is using a sneaker as a cozy for his lean cup, Mike is selling dope with a buccaneer, Von assures Rio that his opps aren’t skilled enough to get him, and Baby Money is probably off telling people about how Eminem gifted Elton John and his husband diamond encrusted cock rings on a velvet cushion for their anniversary between takes.
Are we allowed to say a song exudes aura without getting boo’d? There’s nothing technical about this one that will blow your mind, but it’s just a cool-sounding song. The UK underground has been in a strong place for the last year and a half, with guys like Rico and EsDeeKid continuing to put out trance-inducing music. It also probably has something to do with the music video on a random rooftop in the city that’s lit only by iPhone photo flashes to make it feel like they’re some mysterious figures getting paparazzi sicced on them.
BabyTron is the king of beat switches, but not your typical dramatic single swap. This is now his fourth song where he’s rapped on more than 10 beats in a single track, and the gimmick never gets old. This time, the Michigan rapper spits about 4 bars over one song from each year from 1980 to the present. The video shows him superimposed in the setting of each of those videos, with a wild fit to match. He spans from Grandmaster Flash to Chamillionaire all the way to Juice Wrld and Not Like Us. According to an interview he did with Rolling Stone’s Andre Gee about it, this song was something he was sitting on from years ago, and he just started filling in the blanks to make it happen in the leadup to his next album. He spent almost 50K on the video and assumes he’s going to get copyrighted to hell, but proclaimed it was all “for the love of music, bro.”
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